On Watership Down: The meaning of the the Black Rabbit of Inle

I must confess that much of my love of writing or even my adventurous
nature and the creative side of my personality derives from my mother being an
English teacher. At an early age she
instilled in my older brother and I as well as my younger sister a love of
reading, learning and ultimately thinking for ourselves, a process which my
father encouraged and did not seek to restrain in any way. For my part I tend
to be drawn towards genres that fire the imagination such as fantasy and science
fiction but equally I try to read and understand many other genres that spark my
interest but for the most part it has always been the works of fantasy that
have fascinated me from a young age. By the time I was in junior high I had
read Tolkien’s collected works including trying to muddle my way through the Silmarillion.
I had traveled to Xanth with Piers Anthony and found Shanarra with Brooks. I had marveled
at the complex characters of Herbert’s Dune and rode the wings of dragons with
Hickman and Weis. Somewhere in my journey among the realms of mythical
creatures and fantastical worlds I found the simple story of a group of rabbits
and their journey from death to a new life, Watership Down. A book I have read
many many times just for the sheer enjoyment of it. So to say I am familiar with the work of
Richard Adams would not be an exaggeration.

So as I have said my mother is an English teacher or she has
been one off and on throughout my life often times taking many years off to
raise children and spend time with grandchildren but returning to her passion
for teaching when time would allow. This past year she has been under contract
to teach English to juniors, seniors and some sophomores at my Alma mater
Central High School. The final unit they covered as far as literature goes was
Watership Down, a book I recommended and one she assigned as an independent read
with no in class discussion or work on it. About this time the job which my
mother held went from being a one year contract to a full time position and she
had to reapply for her job, a daunting task for a woman of some fifty-nine
years, yet still she had the inside track as she was already doing the job.

I feel I must pause here to explain something to my readers.
I live in North Dakota and for those of you not familiar with North Dakota is
sits along the northern border of the United States in pretty much the
geographic center of the country. It is a hard land that breeds a certain kind
of tough and hard working people. It is uncommonly flat and open in the east while
the west is rolling hills and valleys as it near the Badlands, a name which
tells the reader all they need to know about that area of the state. North
Dakota’s only recent claim to fame besides two floods which threatened the two
largest cities in the eastern half of the state in the last 20 years, nearly
destroying the town I live in and threatening the other, is that the state
government very foolishly tried to remove the word “North” from the state name
feeling that the negative connotations of the word kept tourism low and drove
young people from the state. Let’s be fair here the total lack of anything
remotely like what many consider real life is what drives young people from the
state not the word north. So what this means is that in order to keep young
people in the state and keep the state growing they have to try to entice them
with promises of jobs, can you see where I am going with this? My mother who is
uniquely qualified to do the job she is doing and having lived in this town for
the last 34 years with no thought of leaving the state was beat out of her job
by a young women two years out of college and who had only taught middle school
kids for a year and a half, no experience with high school students many of who
would be barely five years younger than her. My mother was devastated and the
thought of grading papers that her seniors had turned in on Watership Down did
not seem to appeal to her. I volunteered to read them and offer my critique since
I know and love the book which brings us in a nice roundabout way to the subject
of this piece or at least my opinion on the meaning of the Black Rabbit of Inle

As I read these papers I was able to quickly separate those
who had done the reading from those that
had used Cliff Notes or Spark Notes or whatever the ”study aides” are called
these days, still cheat sheets in my mind. Yet with every paper it was the second
essay question that I was most baffled by. the question was who is the Black Rabbit and
why do you think BigWig wanted to hear the story? Almost every student wrote
something identical about the Black Rabbit being the rabbit equivalent of the Angel
of Death and more than half of them hit upon the idea that the Black Rabbit was
evil. I was a little bit upset by this whole line of thinking by these young
people, of course nearly eighteen years separate me from my senior year in high
school so maybe I am out of touch but could this really be the thinking of the
youth today.

Now yes, the Black Rabbit does represent what we would think
of as the literary embodiment of the Angel of Death. It does have that familiarity that many of
the stories and myths surrounding our own version of the Angel of Death have
but should that be viewed as evil personified? Is it the color black that gives
these young readers the image of some kind of evil creature? The color black in
this case represents the unknown, it ties in with the rabbits view of death
since not only is the time of death unknown but also what causes it. The Black
Rabbit therefore stands for this thing they can’t explain, the unseen death in
the black of night. Is this an evil thing or just a fact of life?

Perhaps that is why I do not view the Black Rabbit as evil
as my mother’s student do. I have a different outlook on death than they do.
To me death cannot be evil or good it is just a transition from one state to
the next. The events and circumstances around death can be viewed as those things but the
death itself is just the absence of life. It is no more evil or good than
flipping a light switch. You go from dark to light and the circumstances may
change and those can color perception from it being good or evil but the act of
turning on a light is not. In an attempt to understand death we as humans have
constructed the angel of death just as the rabbits have the Black Rabbit of
Inle. It somehow makes it seem more
acceptable to know that some being or creature has measured out the length of
our life and knows the hour of our death than it is to simply not know, to be
totally mystified by something that in one minute is living and the next is
not. So to me the Black Rabbit is an attempt to rationalize and understand that
which we all have trouble with, our own mortality.

This is one of the points within the story of the Black
Rabbit as it is told to Bigwig and the others. There is no bargaining with the
Black Rabbit or in essences no arguing with death. You must go when called
means that there is no fighting that which is inevitable your own death. These
are Adams attempts to give us his own understanding of the fragility of life
and the fate we all succumb too. There
is so much depth to the themes of life and death and the struggle to
understand it contained in this book perhaps it is
expecting too much for sixteen, seventeen and eighteen year olds to understand
those complex issues when their young lives have only just begun.

I think a lot of my own surprise stems from knowing the book
and having my own thoughts and opinions on it. In the end I didn’t find fault
with any of the essay papers that attempted to explain the question of who is
the Black Rabbit but it did stir in me the desire to find these young people
and talk to them, reason with them, to listen to their thoughts on the book. I
suggested to my mother that next time she might want to just have a discussion
day or two that is if she hasn’t lost that zeal to teach that she instilled in
her children at a young age. Who know perhaps this is the first step for me on
path to a new future, me teaching, yeah I don’t know about that but discussing
Watership Down I will always be on board for that.

Comments 4 comments

Nothing comes easily but I try to keep writing or thinking about writing even when the mood isn't with me. I used to work at several mundane jobs that kept my hands busy but let my mind wander and that is where most of the ideas happened. I once told a friend that I have lines of dialogue and character studies for them running through my head constantly as well ones for several different stories. If I make it seem easy it isn't but I do credit my mother for helping me on that path.

Rosie 6 years ago

it is a book that has touched me. i have read it more times than i can remember. xxxx

Abbie 3 years ago

To be honest, I'm an 18 year-old that just recently read this book and I feel the same way about the black rabbit as you do. It DOES explicitly state in the book that he actually works alongside Frith and that he doesn't have good or bad intentions. I believe the reason Bigwig wanted the story told was so that the others would know that, though death can never be bargained with, it's still under the guidance of an incredibly powerful being. Because of this, they can have courage to know that what is is simply what must be; they can never truly have deaths that are not intended and so, it wouldn't be a bad thing to take the risk of going to Efrafa. Then again, I read this book on my own time, not for school, so I had the time to let it all sink in at my own pace.